Sublime

I am superterrestrial, he thought, and passed untouched through crowds on Aldleigh High Street with the waters of his body drawn up by the moon with the tides.

A woman was leaving the asylum on midsummer morning. She went warily down steps leading to a gravel drive, observing her own feet with interest and care, as she might have watched children inclined to run into the road.

I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child.

was so cold I went into a sort of dream, where I was the marsh and the house as well as myself, where I was slippery wet wood and claggy mud …

Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one’s gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood.

who sprang up from the ground itself with gnarled hands and woody skin and roots deep enough to tap into her own hidden well.

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.